1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to the field of electronic document evaluation, and more specifically to a system and method for rating the applicability of a specified list of attributes to an electronic document implemented through an attribute weighting, ranking and sorting system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, electronic documents are created in a natural language format, for example, resumes, online dating profiles, recipes versus ingredients etc. This unstructured format often requires time consuming user evaluation of the document.
In order to automate an electronic system for evaluating a large number of unstructured electronic documents, a user must define a set of rules for use in determining the suitability or applicability of a document to a set of criteria. The flexible nature of the English language makes defining such rules difficult.
Most commonly, an automated system may be used to collect the electronic documents, but a user must then read each document to evaluate the document's applicability to a set of criteria.
Another commonly used system requires the use of structured documents. Users are frequently presented with a software interface containing multiple discrete entry fields. Users are then asked to fill out each entry field with information from their document.
Regarding the prior art, the most current implementations of electronic document profile matching require a structured document. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,691,223, issued Jan. 20, 2004 to Sundaresan, discloses a system allowing a user to match indices in an XML document to a target document.
XML, or Extensible Markup Language, is a strictly defined set of rules for representing data in electronic documents. The XML format allows documents to be read by a wide variety of computing systems, without regard for differences in operating system, hardware, and software dependencies. The limitation of this system is that the target document must be formatted in a structured manner.
Additional implementations of electronic profile comparison currently require large amounts of data input. U.S. Pat. No. 6,735,568, issued May 11, 2004 to Buckwalter, et al., discloses a “Method and system for identifying people who are likely to have a successful relationship”. However, this invention requires users to answer an extensive set of questions in order build an electronic profile.
Currently in the art, a problem exists where a large number of unstructured electronic documents must be evaluated against an objective set of criteria. For example, in employment recruiting, it is common to receive over 500 new resumes for a single job position with generally available skill requirements. Additionally, when searching through previously stored resumes, only 100 out of 10000 (1%) of received resumes, on average, will match a given position. Within the 100 received resumes matching a given position, approximately 20 qualified candidates must be personally interviewed by an employment agency or corporate HR department to find a single candidate right for a particular job.
The task of paring down a large number of candidate resumes typically requires an employment recruiter to manually search job sites and stored resumes, where the recruiter must read and evaluate each resume, or to recall previous candidate resumes from memory. Some particularly organized employment recruiting companies have been able to categorize and store candidate resume data. However, this requires gathering copious amounts of information by manually reading resumes and interviewing candidates in person, by telephone or through structured web based forms.
It becomes apparent from the foregoing that a need exists for an automated method of analyzing large volumes of unstructured documents to generate a list of documents that closely matches a desired profile.